Systems and methods for executable code detection, automatic feature extraction and position independent code detection

Abstract

Disclosed herein are systems and methods for enabling the automatic detection of executable code from a stream of bytes. In some embodiments, the stream of bytes can be sourced from the hidden areas of files that traditional malware detection solutions ignore. In some embodiments, a machine learning model is trained to detect whether a particular stream of bytes is executable code. Other embodiments described herein disclose systems and methods for automatic feature extraction using a neural network. Given a new file, the systems and methods may preprocess the code to be inputted into a trained neural network. The neural network may be used as a 'feature generator' for a malware detection model. Other embodiments herein are directed to systems and methods for identifying, flagging, and/or detecting threat actors which attempt to obtain access to library functions independently.